18-Year-Old Arrested over Cyberattack on Internet Cafe Operator

Tokyo, July 9 (Jiji Press)–An 18-year-old man has been arrested for his suspected involvement in a cyberattack on the operator of the Kaikatsu Club internet cafe chain, according to investigative sources. On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police Department’s cybercrime countermeasure division arrested the company employee from Tokyo’s Katsushika Ward, who was in the second year of high school at the time of the incident, on suspicion of fraudulent obstruction of business and violation of the law against unauthorized computer access. He has denied parts of the allegations, the sources said. In the cyberattack on the internet cafe chain operator Kaikatsu Frontier Inc., a computer program that a high school boy from the western Japan city of Osaka developed using the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot was used. The high school boy was arrested last December and is undergoing a juvenile court hearing. The program in question was shared in a social media group chat, and authorities believe others, including a boy who was in the sixth grade of elementary school at the time, may have been involved in the cyberattack. According to the sources, the 18-year-old man taught himself programming starting around the third grade of elementary school and once finished third in a cybersecurity technology competition. He allegedly sent more than 7.24 million fraudulent commands to a server of an app managed by Kaikatsu Frontier in the three days from Jan. 18 last year in an attempt to obtain membership information. He is suspected of obstructing the company’s operations by forcing it to suspend some functions of the app. The suspect was arrested on a separate charge of computer fraud last month after allegedly registering for an embedded subscriber identity module, or eSIM, under another person’s name between September and October 2024. Membership information fraudulently obtained through the cyberattack was collected and compiled in a database by a 19-year-old unemployed man, who has been referred to prosecutors for fraudulent obstruction of business, the sources said. No misuse of compromised information has been confirmed. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]